Friday, February 15, 2013

Homeland Security Ammo Claims Don't Add Up

This FOX News article attempts to shrug off any questions about why the Department of Homeland Security is in the process of buying 1.6 billion rounds of ammunition. The article is rather condescending in tone, saying that notices of the buy "have agitated conspiracy theorists since the Fall", as if no one else besides "conspiracy theorists" were troubled by the news that internal security forces for the federal government alone are acquiring enough ammunition to shoot every citizen alive five times.

I have long maintained that FOX is "controlled opposition" to make some on the right believe that they have a trusted big media outlet to gather information from. The man who owns the biggest share of FOX is Australian billionaire Ruppert Murdoch, who has close business relations with the government of communist China. The man who owns the second biggest share is a Muslim Prince from Saudi Arabia, so naturally conservatives across America should trust the talking heads these men hire to tell them what "conservative" means and who their acceptable candidates are!

But, I digress into a sarcastic rabbit trail. Please accept my apologies. I will quickly return to doing what FOX should have done were they an actual news outlet rather than just another propaganda instrument for globalism- take a critical look at DHS claims in the FOX report.

The FOX report accepted without question a government spokesperson's claim that they purchased the ammunition in such large quantities so they they could get what amounted to a volume discount. The report also noted that almost half of the purchase was going to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). The purchases would be spread out over four or five years, and DHS training centers use "up to" 15 million rounds a year for training their roughly 70,000 agents.

OK, I am just an unpaid blogger, but here are some things a real news agency concerned with holding the government accountable instead of covering for them would have found: They would have found that the fact that ICE was getting almost half of those 1.6 billion rounds was of little comfort, because they are a part of Homeland Security and the current administration appears to be busy transforming them from an agency which mostly pursues illegal aliens to one whose duties are now (and this is taken straight from their website):

"the ICE mission, responsible for investigating a wide range of domestic and international activities arising from the illegal movement of people and goods into, within and out of the United States."

Ah, the "illegal movement of goods WITHIN the United States." They would not use the ICE Homeland Investigative Unit to do things like search for "illegal" weapons and magazines in the homes of citizens who have never left the country in their lives would they? Ah, but of course they would. Let's see what they themselves say about it:HSI investigates immigration crime, human rights violations and human smuggling, smuggling of narcotics, weapons and other types of contraband, financial crimes, cybercrime and export enforcement issues. ICE special agents conduct investigations aimed at protecting critical infrastructure industries that are vulnerable to sabotage, attack or exploitation.

There you have it. If FEDGOV declares magazines over 10 rounds "illegal" then it will be ICE agents who will come and arrest you for this "contraband".

Whatever those hundreds of millions of rounds of ammunition are for, it does not appear that using ICE to apprehend illegal aliens figures high on the list. Various sources, including FOX itself, have reported that the morale among ICE agents has plummeted due to the administrations refusal to hold illegal aliens they apprehend. Since it is obvious they will be participating in any future unconstitutional round up of gun owners, I think we should count their share of the rounds toward the total as we consider whether it is excessive.

But note the dishonest math here. The DHS spokesperson says that almost half those rounds go to ICE, as if they were separate from DHS. ICE is a part of DHS (note the shield upper right). Those 70,000 agents they train include ICE agents. They are trying to pretend that much of that ammo goes to "someone else" when that "someone else" is a part of their own outfit! And FOX did not catch this? C'mon. They are either that stupid, or it is an attempt to convince lower-IQ conservatives that they should not be alarmed at the ammo purchases because much of it is just going to be used against those illegal aliens from Mexico that they dislike so much!

I hate to even give credibility to their obvious disinformation by using their bogus number, but even the amount they admit is going to "DHS" is outrageously excessive. I will use their 750 million round figure even though I have already shown it is disinformation and we should be counting all 1.6 billion rounds. They say they use "up to " 15 million rounds a year for training. Let's say that number represents their annual needs. So 750/15 = 50 years. Right now, with the debt ceiling getting shattered, no budget for years, and FEDGOV borrowing almost half of every dollar it spends, they think they need to stock up on fifty years worth of ammunition! At that rate, in the year 2060 they would still be using stockpiles purchased with this order! The claims are not credible.

Also dubious is the claim that they made such a large order so that they could "save money." I agree that "volume discounts" are a valid concept, but there is a point of diminishing returns involved in such discounts. That is, while I might be able to get a better price on 500,000 rounds than I get on 5,000 rounds, there is negligible production savings when going from 500,000 rounds to one million rounds. At that point, the extra storage space, the risk of loss or damage over the years, and the fact that bids tend to be more competitive when you trickle them out than when you max out every provider's capacity at once all lead to the conclusion that there will be no cost savings in this approach.

Additionally, if they were worried about cost savings they could have ordered wadcutter or other training ammo instead of the hollow point ammo that they did in fact order. Hollow points are much more expensive to make, but much deadlier. That's why they are banned by the Geneva Convention for use in war, but apparently it is OK for internal security forces like DHS to use them on their own population.

So am I being too hard on FOX for messing up on one article, no matter how misleading it may be? Not at all, for among other reasons that this is not the only article FOX has published on the matter. Last August they put this trash out, and I called them on it with a similar article here. In that previous article, FOX would not even admit that DHS was the entity behind the order, and cited numbers which made it seem like the order behind the controversy was for a couple of hundred thousand rounds of ammunition instead of well over a billion.